I hear rumors...

...that the Silverton will soon be re-opening its poker room, under the management of Cantor Gaming.

...that the Plaza, too, is planning to re-open its poker room.

...that the Lady Luck casino downtown is including a poker room in its current renovation.

Mind you, I have no reliable source for these things. They're just rumors I've heard recently.

We shall see if any of them comes to pass.

Lazy Sunday

My day:

I woke up, after having dreamed that I hung onto the wing of the space shuttle and hitched a ride all the way up to the International Space Station, which was pretty cool. (Apparently I can breathe in outer space, which might come in handy someday.) I had lunch while watching "Reliable Sources" on CNN. I like Howard Kurtz. I played two SNG tournaments on Bodog, nothing in one, shipped the other.

While I was doing that, I was seeing Twitter messages from my friends Stacey and Don of Las Vegas Poker Source about how well Stacey was doing in the U.S. Ladies Poker Championship at the Golden Nugget. She had started the final table at noon with one of the short stacks, but had bullied her way upward.

I hatched a plan. The Plaza hotel and casino has been closed for renovation for several months, and just reopened Thursday. I had heard that a gourmet cupcake shop, Gigi's, was part of the new restaurant lineup, and I wanted to indulge. I'm within easy walking distance of both the Nugget and the Plaza, so I decided to walk to the Nugget and if it looked like Stacey would still be in for a while, I'd head off to the Plaza and buy three cupcakes to share with her and Don in celebration of her deep run. By the time I got there to check in with them, it was down to the final three, and her stack was healthy, so off to the Plaza I went. But to my great disappointment, I learned that Gigi's isn't going to open for another several days. No cupcakes for us. Boo!

I went back to the Nugget just as Stacey was beginning the heads-up battle. Here she is, looking all fierce. Or maybe bored. You decide:

Stacey was head-and-shoulders better than her last remaining opponent. This other woman had no concept of bet sizing. She was opening for up to eight times the big blind, or reraising all-in for 50+ big blinds after a standard opening raise from Stacey. Reckless. Or perhaps she recognized that she was outclassed, and figured that she'd enhance the luck factor by trying to play a few big pots pre-flop, so as not to have to face the more difficult decisions post-flop. Either way, it worked well enough, and Stacey couldn't overcome the chip deficit with which she started the last phase of the tournament. But she played great, from what I could see, and walked away with more than $6000. She is an excellent tournament player and has been slaying events for the past year or so (see Hendon Mob listing here).

I walked across the plaza to Binion's to play some poker myself. I had to wait a while for a new table to open, and passed the time reading a few more pages in the brand-new poker novel The Superuser--my first Kindle book (reading on my Android phone). I'm a little more than halfway through, and will do a post about it when I'm done.

I made $123 in an hour, but really didn't feel like playing any more, so I cashed out, picking up the new issues of various poker magazines as I left. I kept one of the chips for my collection. It's a new issue since the last time I played at Binion's, commemorating the casino's recent 60th anniversary:

I went back to the Plaza to see if the remodeling had made the place nice enough to be worth taking pictures of. Nope. It looked mostly the same as I remember it, though admittedly I had only been there twice before, and it was a long time ago. I mean, there's new carpet and better lighting, but nothing like the complete re-do that the Tropicana recently received. No poker room in the new place. But I snapped a few pictures for the "Guess the Casino" series anyway.

On my way home I passed a couple of mildly interesting sights. There's always a bunch of people dressed up as showgirls and celebrities, hoping tourists will tip them to pose for a photo. This was a new twist on the genre--the famous Vegas sign. No need to drive out past Mandalay Bay!

(I achieved a minor personal breakthrough with this photograph, even though it looks unremarkable. When I got home and uploaded the day's shots to my computer, I found that I had left the white balance set on "incandescent" for the indoor shots at the Plaza, which made this one pervasively blue-tinted. But I discovered how to do color correction using Microsoft Picture Viewer and fixed it.)

Then there was this young woman with interesting hair, dancing enthusiastically on stage:

I came home and did a crossword puzzle with Cardgrrl via Skype. Now it's time for a snack while I watch "Top Gear" (the kind-of-sucky-but-gradually-getting-better American version) from earlier tonight. Then wash the dishes, probably a couple more Bodog single-tables, put up another's week's worth of GTC posts, then to bed.

See what an exciting life I lead?

Plaza: Another stinky dump

Since I got on kind of a roll of finally knocking down my list of poker rooms not yet visited, I decided to hit two more of them in one night. The Plaza, downtown, was the second stop, but I'll talk about it first.

They've moved the room sometime in the past year, because I once stopped in there when they had no game going, and the tables were out in the middle of the casino floor, roped off. Now it's near a corner, with a little half-fence around its perimeter.

There are four regular tables plus one small one that I assume is for stud games. (In seven-card stud, every player gets his own seven cards, so it's rather difficult to play ten-handed, there being only 52 cards in the deck. So stud tables are smaller, to hold just seven or eight players.) There was only one in use, for a $2-4 limit hold'em game. Ho-hum. But I dutifully played for my hour.

The strangest thing about this room, as you can see from the first image above, is that it has limited hours. I don't recall seeing this in any other poker room in the city. I was there, and they really did shut down the game at 1:45 a.m. so that they could close up and get the employees out by 2:00--even though the game was still going strong (well, with seven players anyway). Very peculiar.

The other notable thing was how smoky it was. I'm home now and I positively reek. Leaving out the couple of places where smoking at the tables is allowed, this is absolutely the highest concentration of cigarette smoke I've yet encountered. It's strange because the casino was nearly empty, yet there was always a visible haze of smoke in the room. It's as if they had installed a diabolical ventilation system that sucked all of the cigarette smoke from the casino floor and blew it out into the poker room. I don't know how else there could have been that much of it. It was truly awful. My eyes were burning, and that hasn't been so even at Arizona Charlie's and Boulder Station, where people were smoking at the table.

I might have guessed it would be that way from the third peculiar fact: there's a cigarette vending machine right inside the poker room! Kind of a hint, eh?

One notable, memorable thing happened there that was unprecedented for me, though it had nothing to do with the room per se. I got bored and threw in a straddle, which I do maybe once out of, say, four or five whole sessions of poker--which is to say, very rarely. And this time I picked up pocket aces! Of course, the story isn't allowed to have a happy ending. I didn't improve and got sucked out on by a guy with 5-6 offsuit who flopped two pair. Oh well. At least now I can say that I've had the experience of pocket aces on a straddle bet.

The Plaza is one of five poker rooms that is within easy walking distance of my apartment (others being the El Cortez, Fitzgerald, Golden Nugget, and Binion's). I wish it had some redeeming quality, but I found none. As with most badly-run rooms, players were allowed to talk openly about the hand in progress, with not even a hint of disapproval from any dealer. I hate that.

In fact, let me list the qualities shared by a whole bunch of rooms that I've played in once, and don't expect ever to return to: Out in the open casino floor, with no shelter from smoke and noise; rarely any no-limit game going; only the lowest limit game(s) going; only a handful of tables; horrible quality of play; mostly inhabited by life losers; players primarily there to socialize and/or try to hit a high-hand jackpot or bad-beat jackpot; mostly players who seem generally unhappy with life, with few smiles and laughs ever seen; marginally competent dealers; little or no effort to enforce even basic rules; physically dirty, dingy, icky places to spend time.

That roster of dismal qualities is basically shared by the following places: El Cortez, Plaza, Gold Coast, Arizona Charlie's, Jokers Wild, Rampart, Texas Station, Tuscany, as well as the now-closed Fiesta Rancho and Stardust. They're all just dreadful, worthless places. There are a bunch of others that I don't like much, but at least have some redeeming value that I can point to, so that I can give them a C- or D+. But this list of eight (so far) are the dregs, the crap that sinks to the bottom in an ocean of poker rooms.